


In Which Their Articulation Was Achieved

by Birdbitch



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-05
Packaged: 2020-04-08 02:37:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19098043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Birdbitch/pseuds/Birdbitch
Summary: Steve notices Natasha looking. "He's a good guy," he says.





	In Which Their Articulation Was Achieved

**Author's Note:**

> Me after finishing my degree: Wow I'm going to have so much time to work on my unfinished multi-chapter fic now  
> Me currently: There's not enough Sam/Nat in the world.  
> Super short. Title is pulled out of context from "The Use of Bodies". Enjoy.

“He seems like a good guy,” is what Steve says when he gets into the Corvette, after noticing how Natasha’s eyes had looked maybe a little longer than strictly necessary. 

“Hm,” Natasha says noncommittally. She doesn’t need a ‘good guy’ any more than she needs any guy, is what she thinks. There’s a lot of reasons to be suspicious of men, Steve notwithstanding. Steve Rogers, she’s come to understand, is an outlier, and would probably stop speaking to her if he knew just what kind of missions SHIELD has had her do on her own—even if he’s willing to look past virtually everything in her left before. 

That’s what it feels like, at least. Her life has a very distinct “before” and “after.” Natasha sees herself as fully Americanized now, reconstructed into a different kind of weapon. Steve hums a little, has a side-ways smirk on his face that makes her want to roll her eyes at him, but doesn’t make her stop smiling, too. “He’s outside the circle,” she says, and then it’s Steve’s turn to roll his eyes.

“Aren’t you the one who was telling me that I needed to start dating?”

Point. 

The next time she sees Sam Wilson is not with Steve, but at Whole Foods. Sometimes, she thinks, it’s easier to think of herself as just that—a weapon—because weapons are, by design, less complicated. Less emotions. When she’s had to do honeypot missions, she pretends she’s not even a person at all, and the “training” certainly made it easier to dissociate like that. But she’s not on a mission; she’s in a grocery store in Washington, DC, and Steve’s cute running partner is in the same aisle and they’ve caught each other’s eyes. “You’re Steve’s friend, right?” he asks, recognizing her. She could duck out—you’re mistaking me with someone else, a line she’s used plenty of times before—but he smiles at her. Easy. Disarming. 

“Yeah,” she says, even though she’s not sure they’re friends so much as close colleagues. Hasn’t asked for specification, is afraid to. “You’re his running partner.”

“Not sure it’s a partnership when you can’t keep up,” Sam says. “You can make cocktail sauce, by the way. It’ll be better than store bought.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” 

Everything feels like a test; she’s been trying really hard to not think of things that way. “Maybe you could show me how,” she says, which breaks some of her own rules, which have been arbitrary for the most part, but have also kept her from getting hurt. Steve doesn’t know all of her rules, and neither, for that matter, does Clint. 

“I might have plans tonight,” Sam says, “but what about tomorrow?”

Tomorrow she’ll be on a quinjet over the Atlantic, getting ready to jump out of the plane with Steve onto a small target in the middle of the ocean to collect sensitive data which even Steve doesn’t know about. He doesn’t know half the shit they have her up to while he plays interference, because he half the time doesn’t even know he’s playing interference in the first place. One day, she thinks, she’ll come clean about it and everything else. “What about after your plans tonight? I’m up late.” 

The smile gets a little more playful; she likes this. How often does she get to flirt with no ulterior motive? How often does she get to feel flustered? Never, that’s how often, but Sam doesn’t know that and plays the game as if she’s anyone else. Doesn’t make her feel like it’s a job. “What’s your number?” Sam asks. Maybe stupidly, she gives him her real number, not the one for the burner in her pocket book, which will be disposed of in the next two days. “I’ll call you when I’m free.”

“Alright,” she says, and she’s never felt this kind of excitement before—for one, the chance that maybe Sam won’t call, for another, the chance that he will. Has never had the chance to, or the reason. Guys try to talk to her all the time; not all of them have a Steve Seal of Approval, and most of them she doesn’t bother giving the time of day to. 

When the phone rings a little after nine, she jumps, answers it. “Are you around? Plans ended a little early.” Yes, I’m around. Yes, you should come over. Twenty minutes later, Sam Wilson’s asking to be buzzed into the building, and then she’s letting him into her apartment. “Into the minimalism thing?” he asks, carrying a bag of food containing not only, Natasha assumes, the ingredients for homemade cocktail sauce, but more. Her apartment looks like a room from an Ikea catalog; the pieces are replaceable, cheap, clean. Not her, but impersonal. Chic, if anything. It’s never really bothered her before.

“I’m not really here a lot,” she says. Or maybe it doesn’t bother her so much as it feels suddenly like it is lacking—lacking a warmth, an invitation. Who’s she ever wanted to bring home, though? For everything she’s done, for all the experience she’s had, it’s almost always something able to be resolved in a hotel room. 

Sam doesn’t push her into explaining, just asks, “Do you like sports or movies more?”

 

And this is what they do for the next couple of nights that she’s in town, when she gets back from an assignment. He and Steve are still running and doing their own decompressing thing, whatever it is that they need to do; different traumas, she knows. Steve’s the kind of person who  _ has _ to talk about things. There’s a golden retriever quality about him that she admires; she’s more of a Doberman pinscher. Of course, then the world destroys itself, and Natasha is looking down the barrel of a war crime trial or trials for her own past actions, everything that she’s ever done exposed at the same time she’s exposed Hydra. It was worth it, she thinks. Knows. She doesn’t get to be sure of very many things, but this—this has got to be one of them. 

After the fact, once the dust has mostly settled and she’s secluded herself for long enough, Sam asks to be buzzed up to the apartment. “Steve’s asked me to help him find his best friend,” he says when he gets up. He puts a plate of cookies on the counter—his mother makes them, always makes too many of them for him to eat on his own. He sees her at least once a week. 

“Are you going to do it?”

“Even though the guy tried to kill us?” Sam’s unwrapping a bag of microwave popcorn to put in her microwave. “I’m learning Steve’s a hard guy to say no to.”

He wasn’t always like that, Natasha thinks. Not Steve—she has the feeling that Steve has always been insistent, persuasive—but the Winter Soldier. Bucky—the name doesn’t feel right to her, because it’s not what she ever called him. “Not everyone’s able to get away,” she says, finally. She doesn’t plan on getting into it, not really. “Did you read everything?”

“Skimmed a lot of it. You leaked over 50 years of classified documents.” He clears his throat. “Besides, I figure if it’s anything you think is important, you’ll tell me.” 

He knows and doesn’t know, then. Good and bad. If he knows everything, Natasha thinks, he could just leave. Or maybe not—he’s going to be following Steve around the country looking for—Bucky. He knows she’s killed people. Knows enough that the Red Room existed, that she was there.

Her favorite thing about coming to America was the junk food, she thinks, when he hands her the bag of popcorn, and she looks at the kernels, and can’t help but feel overwhelmed. She also liked being able to move around freer, then freely. It’s not so much the case anymore, especially not now that the weather’s actually warm and it’s harder to disguise herself. The media knows who she is and that she lives in DC. “I can’t drag you into it,” she says, smiling, and Sam rolls his eyes.

“Already in it,” he says. There’s a moment, there, sitting on the couch. He takes the popcorn back, puts it on the coffee table. 

It’s terrifying, Natasha realizes, to be in this position, to be able to do anything, and to do it because she wants to, not because someone else is telling her to do it. To want to do anything like this with a man who has no ulterior motives himself. Steve was right; Sam Wilson is a good guy. Doesn’t change the fact that Natasha’s reaction to being touched tenderly is to stiffen up, unsure how to react naturally because it hasn’t been natural in so long. “Is this alright?” Sam asks, and she nods her head. Thinks about the fact that she is on a couch in her space, a couch which she bought, and that Sam is—safe. “I’ve got you,” she thinks she hears him say. Okay, okay. 

It takes a minute into kissing that Natasha feels like she can actually relax. Sam Wilson, who was willing to become a fugitive with her and Steve to take down corruption from within an organization he didn’t even have a personal stake in, not like she did and not like Steve did. Sam Wilson, whose hands are gentle at the back of her neck and the top of her hip, moving when she moves, slowly. “Do you want to,” she asks, feeling a little out of breath. 

“Do you?”

Yes and no. Yes—immediate desire and need, which has been building since picking Steve up in the Corvette that first morning. No—aware of the fact that she could have a freak out and try to kill him without meaning to do it. “I need to work through some things first,” she says. “Things I’ve—been putting off.”

“I know how that is.” He shifts away from her. “In the meantime—do you want to watch the movie?”

She reaches for his hand, is relieved when he squeezes it back. “Yeah. Let’s watch the movie.”


End file.
